Blog Archives

Amazon announce the setting up of their own Film making enterprise, a completely pluralistic exercise that has been tried before with little success. The idea is to let the public decide what films they want to see, and therefore what should be made. But this is just a mini version of the Hollywood system (What’s selling today? Quick! Make more of them!) It doesn’t work on a small scale, in exactly the same way it doesn’t always work on a large scale. Read the rest of this entry →

The makers of sci-fi blockbuster Star Wars have failed in their bid to establish that they owned the copyright in the helmets of the film’s sinister stormtrooper army. In an appeal they lost a right, granted earlier, to enforce a US copyright ruling.Read the rest of this entry →

Ok – here is what I know / believe, from memory. I will try and back a few things up at a later date, and indeed add dates.

Since I am mainly interested in Creative works, let us start with books. Books are a way of capturing ideas and providing us with point no 1 of copyright – having a physical thing to copyright.

So, The Author, having written the book, has a solid representation of the idea. This is now a thing. Just like a painting, a sculpture, etc. It belongs to the Author, but can be owned by whomever it is sold to.

And here we have a starting point. David is Michelangelo’s, not the Duke who bought it. The duke has bough the right to have it in his house, to display it, and say “look how rich and tasteful I am. Here is Michelangelo’s David”. Everything is fine.Read the rest of this entry →

Copyright covers Satire – or does it. Interesting case that also raises questions about freedom of speech.

The publisher’s lawyers immediately took legal action against the fake METR0 distributors, a group called PressAction that appears to be linked to Indymedia UK, which describes itself as “a network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.”

Both Press Action here and Indymedia here carry identical reports stating that the publication of METR0 was part of a two-day protest against racist and anti-migrant bias in the mainstream media.

Little History to check out-

Distributing fake free papers is not new. A fake activist version of free daily 20 Minuten in Switzerland appeared when the World Economic Forum met in the country. A French labour union published a fake Direct Matin issue during a strike. The New York Times and the Dutch paper de Volkskrant have also been spoofed.

Interesting article about the effect porn has on sexual behaviour, body image and attitudes towards women. Might be able to link this into research about regulation, offence & Harm. The internet should be seena s unregulated, and here is a possible case study.

For people who follow the growing business of video-sharing Web sites, the only real surprise about the suit is that it took so long for someone to drag YouTube or one of its ilk into court. More than 150 companies that host user-generated video on their sites have cropped up in the past year, and many of them don&apos;t pre-screen the material their users put up though most, including YouTube, include a prohibition against copyright infringement in their user agreement. Too often, critics charge, the rights to those videos are owned by someone other than the poster.

Thinking abut the first unit on my MA, and I would liek to go down this avenue of Regulation and Copyright. Richard suggested a Media Literacy route which seems like a nice idea – maybe looking at the perception of the main issues as well as the issues…Read the rest of this entry →

One of the UK’s three biggest internet service providers has vowed not to co-operate with measures to combat file-sharing set out in the government’s controversial digital economy bill, expected to receive royal assent within days.

TalkTalk, with more than 4 million UK internet users, said that “many draconian proposals remain” in the bill, including some that would allow content companies to force internet service providers (ISPs) to block the connections of customers suspected of online copyright infringement.

The Open Rights Group, which campaigns for individual rights online, criticised moves to rush the bill through parliament before the election, saying “measures to allow disconnection of individuals from the internet, for undefined periods of time” and web blocking laws were pushed through “with no real scrutiny and limited debate”.

MPs and Lords complained that sites such as Wikileaks or even Google were at risk of being blocked under an order by the secretary of state, because a new clause inserted by the government on Wednesday night provides powers to block sites that “have been, are being or are likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright”.

The digital economy bill received its final reading in the Lords on Thursday afternoon, with no amendments made – meaning that it has passed all its Parliamentary hurdles and can now pass to royal assent. That triggered a wave of official responses from creative industries and others. See if you can spot who’s on which side…